Two hours after the surgery, Mrs. E.’s nurse called me urgently to see her in the recovery room. Her neck was swelling rapidly; she was bleeding. We rushed her back to the operating room and reopened her neck before accumulating blood cut off her airway.

A small pumping artery had opened up in a thin band of muscle I’d cauterized. I tied the vessel off, washed the blood away, and took her back to the recovery room.

And this might have made her think harder about proceeding (or, at least, encouraged her to find someone cheaper). But, like many people, she didn’t want to be in that situation. So she chose the second option, which provided full coverage for cases like this one. She found it difficult enough to weigh her fears of the cancer against her fears of the operation—with its risks of life-threatening bleeding and voice damage—without having to put finances into the equation.

What if Virginia Mason turns away a back-pain patient who should have gone to surgery? What if Dr. Osio fails to send a heart patient to the emergency room when he should have? What if I recommend not operating on a tiny tumor, saying that it is just a turtle, and it turns out to be a rabbit that bounds out of control?

If an insurer had simply decreed Taylor’s back surgery to be unnecessary, and denied coverage, the Taylors would have been outraged. But the worst part is that he would not have got better. It isn’t enough to eliminate unnecessary care. It has to be replaced with necessary care.